When we look at a painting, we often assume what we’re seeing is the whole story—a beautiful figure, a striking color palette, a harmonious composition. But for some of the most influential art historians of the 20th century, seeing is only the beginning. Erwin Panofsky and Svetlana Alpers spent their careers trying to understand what lies beneath the painted surface. One sought out the mythological codes and classical legacies hidden in brushstrokes; the other challenged those codes, finding meaning not in myth but in what a painting dares to show. Their approaches, while radically different in tone and method, have both shaped the field of art history in lasting ways.

Erwin Panofsky: A Scholar of Hidden Symbols and Mythic Meaning

Born in 1892 in Hannover, Germany, Erwin Panofsky was immersed in the rich intellectual world of early 20th-century Europe. He studied art history and philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg, and Munich, and became closely associated with the humanist tradition of German scholarship. His background in philosophy, especially Neo-Kantianism, left a permanent mark on his way of thinking: he was always looking for systems, structures, and universals.

Panofsky’s most influential contribution to art history was his development of iconology—a method of interpretation that sought to uncover the cultural, philosophical, and literary meanings embedded in a work of art. For Panofsky, paintings were not just objects of beauty; they were visual texts to be read, symbols to be decoded, intellectual puzzles crafted with precision by Renaissance thinkers in paint rather than prose.

After fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Panofsky emigrated to the United States, where he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There, he wrote some of the most enduring texts in the discipline, including “Studies in Iconology” and “Meaning in the Visual Arts.” His approach—rooted in deep contextual reading, classical references, and textual analysis—set the standard for a generation of scholars.

Panofsky’s interpretations frequently framed artworks within a mythological or allegorical tradition. He often argued that Renaissance and Baroque artists embedded ancient symbols into their compositions, reimagining figures from Greek and Roman mythology to reflect contemporary values. In works like Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Panofsky saw more than sensuality or form—he saw Venus, the Roman goddess of love, revived through the lens of Renaissance humanism. The reclining nude wasn’t just a woman; she was an ideal, drawn from a tradition of classical representation and repurposed for a modern elite audience.

Panofsky’s approach placed a high premium on meaning. His method assumed that every element in a composition could—and often should—be translated into a historical or philosophical framework. For many, this made him a master of uncovering depth. But for others, it made him a prisoner of interpretation, always searching for something beyond the visual experience itself.

Svetlana Alpers: Describing, Not Decoding

Born in 1936 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Svetlana Alpers came from a very different world. Educated at Radcliffe and Harvard, she began teaching at UC Berkeley during a time when the field of art history was being redefined by new critical theories, feminist scholarship, and skepticism of canonical interpretations. Where Panofsky sought symbols, Alpers sought surfaces. Where Panofsky asked what a painting meant, Alpers asked how it looked—and how it made us look back.

Alpers made her name with the groundbreaking 1983 book The Art of Describing, which offered a radical rethinking of how to interpret Dutch painting. She argued that the dominant tradition of art history—largely shaped by scholars like Panofsky—was biased toward Italian art, which emphasized narrative, mythology, and allegory. Dutch art, in contrast, wasn’t trying to tell stories. It was trying to capture the world as it appeared. It was an art of observation, not narration.

This emphasis on visual surface, on the act of looking rather than the act of reading, set her apart. Alpers was especially drawn to paintings that seemed to reject grand symbolic programs in favor of intimate, immediate sensory experiences. She pointed to artists like Vermeer, Rembrandt, and even Titian—not to decipher their hidden codes, but to explore their command of vision and desire.

Alpers’s interpretation of Venus of Urbino, for instance, does not dwell on classical symbolism or marital allegory. Instead, she focuses on the painting’s provocative sensuality: the direct gaze of the nude, the softness of her skin, the lush textures of the bedding and drapery. For Alpers, the painting isn’t mythological; it’s confrontational. It dares the viewer to look, and implicates them in the act of looking. The work becomes a conversation about spectatorship, eroticism, and visual power—not about gods or allegories.

She saw many works of Western art as staging performances of sensual display, often for the male viewer, and rarely fully reducible to symbolic systems. Her readings pulled art history toward visual culture, media theory, and feminist critique. In doing so, she helped create a new language for talking about art—one that wasn’t about unlocking hidden meanings, but about confronting what the painting puts right in front of us.

Where They Overlap, and Where They Don’t

It would be a stretch to say that Panofsky and Alpers agreed on how to interpret art. In fact, their methods often pull in opposite directions. But what makes them so fascinating as a pair is that both believed passionately in the importance of looking—and that looking had consequences.

Panofsky believed in the unseen. His work was about looking through the painting to find its intellectual skeleton. Alpers believed in the seen. Her work asked us to stop searching for hidden depths and instead think seriously about what’s on the surface.